Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

This is important, he claims, because the majority of Cisco's datacenter customers – both large and small – are finding themselves deploying workloads across multiple on-prem, collocation, and cloud environments.

The idea behind Nexus Cloud is to extend the same kind of centralized, cloud-delivered network management that Cisco has offered its Meraki wireless and LAN switching customers for years to the datacenter.

However, the product isn't quite ready for prime time, Scheibe admitted. "Customers are telling us that it will take them some time to feel comfortable [enough] to run the whole management of the infrastructure cloud-based. But what they want to do is start monitoring, and troubleshooting, and doing capacity planning, and compliance checks."

At launch, Nexus Cloud will offer centralized monitoring and visibility capabilities, while management will continue to be handled by Nexus Dashboard running on-premises.

Additional functionality, including machine-learning-powered analytics, will come later, Scheibe said. "Over time, we will give customers the option to shift the complete management of the infrastructure into Nexus Cloud."

The platform itself is actually built on top of the Cisco's Intersight platform used by its HyperFlex HCI and USC-X servers.

Intersight got a SaaS revamp of its own last year, and earlier this year Cisco added support for managing Kubernetes clusters and virtual machine instances running in Amazon Web Services EC2.

Thanks to tight integration between Nexus Cloud and Intersight, customers with smaller IT teams can deploy and network workloads running on and off premises from a single dashboard, Scheibe said.

For example, if a customer has a workload running in AWS that needs to connect to a database running on-prem, the combined offering will enable customers to deploy and configure the application and networking all in one go.

Alongside Nexus Cloud, Cisco also detailed its next generation of Nexus datacenter switches, which it says are capable of supporting 400-800Gbps connectivity.

The company's existing Nexus datacenter family was introduced nearly a decade ago, and has been updated over several generations of line cards to support up to 400Gbps networking.

Cisco's 9800-series chassis switches are meant as a sort of reset around a baseline of 400Gbps connectivity, Scheibe explained. He added that just like previous generation Nexus switches, as faster silicon and optics become available, Cisco will offer higher bandwidth line cards to support larger data flows.

Meanwhile, the company plans to launch a smaller modular chassis later this year called the Nexus 9400, which will offer either 64x 400Gbps ports or 128x 200Gbps ports.

Alongside its big modular chassis, Cisco also updated its Nexus 9300 fixed-form-factor switches – bumping up the number of 400Gbps ports from 16 to 48 or 64.

All of the new switches announced at Cisco Live are based on a combination of Cisco's in-house Silicon One and Cloud Scale ASICs.

The update comes as analysts predict strong adoption of 400Gbps networking by major cloud and hyperscale customers.

According to Dell'Oro Group, shipments of 400Gbps switches exceeded 800,000 ports in the first quarter of 2022, and the firm expects that number to continue to ramp up over the next year.

The switches arrive as the first round of 400Gbps NICs are slated to hit the market – though Scheibe expects that most datacenters will top out at 100Gbps connectivity to the client and retain their 400Gbps ports for aggregation.

Cisco's Nexus 9300 and 9800 switches will begin shipping later this quarter, while its 9400s are slated for release this fall. ®

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) roped the Lone Star State into its cloud empire this week with the launch of its Dallas, Texas region.

The $600 million datacenter campus, which broke ground in 2019, is located approximately 25 miles south of the Dallas metro. The site, Google’s 11th in the US and 34th globally, is the latest in an ongoing effort to expand the cloud provider’s reach to new markets.

“We’ve heard from many of you that the availability of your workloads and business continuity are increasingly top priorities," Stacy Trackey Meagher managing director for Google’s central region, said in a statement. “The Dallas region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the US.”

Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.

However, Oracle is still struggling to gain a larger share of the global cloud market, where it lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Big Red's total revenue for Q4, which ended May 31, hit $11.8 billion, up 5 per cent on the same period a year ago. Total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service, reached $2.9 billion, up 19 percent. Cloud ERP Fusion revenue increased 20 percent while NetSuite ERP cloud revenue grew 27 per cent.

RSA Conference Exclusive Establishing some level of cybersecurity measures across all organizations will soon reach human-rights issue status, according to Jeetu Patel, Cisco EVP for security and collaboration.

"It's our civic duty to ensure that everyone below the security poverty line has a level of safety, because it's gonna eventually get to be a human-rights issue," Patel told The Register, in an exclusive interview ahead of his RSA Conference keynote. 

"This is critical infrastructure — financial services, health care, transportation — services like your water supply, your power grid, all of those things can stop in an instant if there's a breach," he said. 

Cloud service providers drove the datacenter switching market to its fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, but it won’t last forever, Dell’Oro Group analyst Sameh Boujelbene told The Register.

While switch vendors managed to shrug off ongoing supply chain challenges in Q1 to collectively grow 16 percent over the prior year, Boujelbene said at some future point supply will once again exceed demand.

"As you take into consideration the lead times, you can project comfortably some growth in the market this year and maybe early 2023 based on demand. All you have to worry about is supply," Boujelbene said. "Unfortunately, at some point we have to start thinking about demand."

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.

It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.

But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.

These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.  

"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

Comment It's hard to suppress an eyeroll when the world's largest consumers of datacenter resources talk about sustainability. Putting the planet ahead of profits is often not at the top of the to-do list in large-scale, performance-driven environments.

Sure, the hyperscalers talk a good game. Carbon offsets, green bonds, and lofty carbon neutrality targets aren't nothing. But it's also the kind of thing that can only be measured on a spreadsheet. And it's certainly not the kind of tangible change that's needed.

It's great that these companies are offsetting their energy use by funding renewable energy projects, but it hardly feels sincere when your datacenters are still rolling coal.

In October 2021, Cisco announced WebEx Hologram – an augmented reality meeting experience that promised "photorealistic, real-time holograms of actual people" and the chance to "share physical and digital content".

Today I tried a prototype of the service, and can report it is … intriguing.

Participating in a WebEx Hologram session requires donning a VR headset, to which end Cisco offered me a Microsoft HoloLens 2. I found the current model pleasingly light and comfortable, and calibrating it took just a few moments of flicking my eyes towards some virtual objects projected into my field of vision.

In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.

This hunger for compute is what has allowed all three companies to grow revenue in the high double digits recently. But there's one fabless chip designer that is growing faster among the largest in the world and it's far from a household name: Marvell Technology.

Silicon Valley-based Marvell grew semiconductor revenue by 72 percent to $1.4 billion in the first quarter, which made it the fastest growing out of the top 10 largest fabless chip designers during that period, according to financials compiled by Taiwanese research firm TrendForce.

Why build a cloud datacenter yourself, when you can rent one from Hewlett Packard Enterprise? It may seem unorthodox, but That’s exactly the approach Singapore-based private cloud provider Taeknizon is using to extend its private cloud offering to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Founded in 2012, Taeknizon offers a menagerie of services ranging from IoT, robotics, and AI to colocation and private cloud services, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. The company’s latest expansion in the UAE will see it lean on HPE GreenLake’s anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform to meet growing demand from small-to-midsize enterprises for cloud services in the region.

“Today, 94% of companies operating in the UAE are SMEs," Ahmad AlKhallafi, UAE managing director at HPE, said in a statement. "Taeknizon’s as-a-service model caters to the requirements of SMEs and aligns with our vision to empower youth and the local startup community.”

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